4 ms·
IIRC Open BSD saves a seed each time the system is turned off. Of course, thebvery first boot is problematic, but this one tends to be the installation.
by pfortuny 5y ago
IIRC Open BSD saves a seed each time the system is turned off. Of course, thebvery first boot is problematic, but this one tends to be the installation.
- loeg 5y agoSaving a seed on disk is fine (and good), but orthogonal to the Fortuna entropy pool design. FreeBSD does the same, but not every bootloader can put it in kernel memory. And/or not every configuration has a writeable /boot. Writing some entropy from the previous boot (or installer) would be helpful for a similar set of Linux systems, but would not solve the problem in the hardest cases. And Linux userspace is developed by a different group than kernel, so it is somewhat harder to make these kind of systemic changes than in BSD land.
- tremon 5y agoSo does Linux (although by default it only seeds it after initial boot, so doesn't help with boot-time seeding), but the problem is that the seed must be trusted. Which may be true (or true enough) in a number of specific cases, but it's not true in general.